When you focus your Thought Work on finding better-feeling thoughts, you tend to stay on the surface of your mind.

Sure, it works for a while (10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 months even) but as soon as you’re challenged by a “triggering event,” all bets are off again.

I explain what a triggering event is and the mind management process I use with my clients called Thought Work 101 in this post about the the internal mental and emotional work we can do in our minds in order to better manage our responses to the people, places, and things in our lives.

I talk about how mind management using Thought Work is one of the most important life skills you can ever learn.

But here’s the thing…

All the thought work in the world will not work against a mind that is stuck in old, stubborn, locked-in patterns. That’s because when one part of your brain (the prefrontal cortex) comes up with a great idea, there’s another old “reptilian” part of the brain that works hard to talk you convince you it’s a bad idea.

The mind has moves.

Slick moves. Tricky moves.

The mind knows how to back itself into a corner. It thinks it’s doing you a favor by coming up with ways that…

         … allow you to keep overeating.

         … make you stay in a love-less relationship.

         … keep you stuck in a job you hate.

         … convince you to stick with friends who drag you down.

The mind likes short-cuts.

It wants instant relief. It comes up with thoughts that keep you going in circles.

Like this one:

“I just need a better-feeling thought.”

It can often turn out to be the kiss of death.

Better-feeling thoughts are like dresses that don’t fit.

No matter how much we may want to fit into an ill-fitting dress, it’s not going to look all that great on your body because it doesn’t fit.

And wanting it to fit won’t make it fit.

The only way to fit into a smaller dress is to do the deep, gut-wrenching thought work that stands between the dress size you wear now and the dress size you want to wear.

You cannot think yourself into a smaller dress until you think your way out of The Land of WTF, the uncomfortable, stifling, messy, frustrating space between where you are now and where you want to be. The Land of WTF can be a nightmare, mostly because we keep trying to fit into the smaller dress now. (You get that the dress is a metaphor, right?)

We want to do a quantum leap from a size 14 to a size 4, without ever having to pass through sizes 12, 10, 8, and 6.

Which is why we stay…

… in the same body,

… in the same relationship,

… in the same job,

… in the same friendship…

…despite all those so-called better-feeling thoughts.

LEARNING HOW TO THINK UP

When I graduated from law school I remember feeling so proud of my ability to “think like a lawyer.” It wasn’t until I hired a coach to help me determine what I wanted to do with my law degree (anything but a 60-hour-a-week law firm job) that I really learned how to think UP, you know, like a card-carrying adult woman.

College courses like philosophy taught me how to think.

Law school taught me how to think like a lawyer.

Coaching taught me how to think like a gutsyass adult woman who’s not afraid to get to know all the parts of herself. 

BEYOND THOUGHT WORK 101

Going deeper into our minds requires guts, grit, and grace, especially once you realize that better-feeling thoughts aren’t guaranteed to make you feel better for longer than a minute. That’s because your mind and its ability to think logically and reasonably can almost find a thought that is “better.”

But that doesn’t mean it will stick.

In other words, you can have an idea to take better care of your body (a so-called better-feeling thought) which can momentarily motivate you to take actions consistent with taking better care of your body, but if you don’t have the underlying belief to support ongoing healthy behavior, you’ll revert back to the original thoughts and beliefs.

It’s simply how the mind works.

Actions speak louder than better-feeling thoughts.

The Deeper Work

Don’t be too quick to rely on finding the better-feeling thought as a replacement for doing the deeper work of understanding the worse-feeling thought and why it’s there in the first place and the belief system it’s rooted in. Otherwise, better-feeling thoughts just circle back to where you were when you first started chasing after a better-feeling feeling.

[thrive_link color=’orange’ link=’https://www.lineleoff.com/thought-work-101/’ target=’_self’ size=’medium’ align=’left’]READ: THOUGHT WORK 101[/thrive_link] [blank_space height=’3em’]

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